No, we pay farmers not to plant crops because they've been fortunate enough to own pieces of land that cannot be farmed without extreme topsoil erosion or other environmental damage, and because it's more popular to bribe the farmers than to take the land outright.
I'm not aware of any other government program that pays farmers not to farm.
So, this tower is more than just silly and impractical; it's actually an existential threat to civilization. First we build this thing, then we start cannibalizing each other. Q.E.D.
If anything, it seems like this would make a civilization more rounded. With some of these in Manhattan, the laborers who grow our food could run home, shower, then go out to see a Broadway musical. You can't do that in Napa Valley. Though if the musical is "Cats," there's no reason you should want to.
Oooh! He knows what "comparative advantage" means!
The problem is, comparative advantage works really well for individuals within a diverse economy. It doesn't work well for entire regions or countries.
Imagine if aliens made contact, and offered us a wonderful deal: They'll make all our food. We, in turn, will manufacture "floovits." Who cares what floovits are. The point is, they want them, we can make them very easily, and we don't actually have any use for them.
We take the deal, shutter our own farms, and start manufacturing floovits like crazy. It's much easier work than farming, takes fewer people, and the food the aliens are giving us is tastier and more nutritious than what we've been growing ourselves.
Perfect example of comparative advantage, right?
Right.
Now comes the kicker. After a few decades, after we've basically forgotten how to feed ourselves, the aliens come to us and say, "we don't need floovits anymore. In fact, we don't need anything from you anymore. Bye."
Even if using Manhattan for office space is a much higher value activity at the moment, there is a perfectly good reason for setting aside some of that capacity for a "lower value" use. I'm sure you've heard of the PhD-level economic concept that underpins this thinking.
2) People just assume that PHP is scalable. It runs Wikipedia, and lots of other huge sites. If Ruby can be compared favorably to PHP, then it's hard to argue that it's "too slow" to base a usable framework off of.
3) Rails people tend to have a bit of a grudge against PHP people. Play nice, children!
Re:I am afraid, there is lack of direction for Rub
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Ruby 1.9.1 Released
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· Score: 3, Insightful
> Besides, inefficient code will add up almost exponentially as your load increases.
Eh?
We're not talking about poor algorithm selection. We're talking about using a slower language rather than a faster language. Unless you deliberately adopt a "slower languages deserve slower algorithms" mentality, you're talking about a linear increase in hardware.
In that case, doubling the hardware requirements in exchange for even a 25% cut in coding time is going to be a huge boon for your company. If writing in a cleaner, more elegant language makes the code base smaller and easier to read, those senior developers are going to have a much easier time finding the bugs and the bottlenecks. Plus, if you can write the thing that much faster, your developers are going to have a lot more fun.
Since we're talking specifically about Rails here, the first optimization pass is usually A) finding pages and partials that can be cached, and B) tweaking your ActiveRecord queries so that the database grabs all the records it needs on the first pass. Both are simple to do, and once you've accomplished them it's going to be quite a while before a normal site is going to run into scaling issues.
>>I've been using the Beta for a while and it isn't a beta like say... an Ubuntu beta. This is a beta of a quality the open source world cannot obtain.
If the graphing calculator market had followed the same price/performance curve that personal computers have, we'd have plenty of powerful $10 calculators today.
Actually, I think we'd have much more powerful $90 graphing calculators.
4) The government runs up some additional debt to get these things on the road.
To me, it makes sense for government to resort to deficit spending whenever there is a project with long-term payoffs, but the short term incentives keep the market from doing it. Still, I might prefer #3, especially if it was part of a tax reform that swapped the payroll tax for a carbon tax. Tax pollution, not work!
You're right about electric cars being cheaper to maintain, if battery degradation weren't an issue. The cars are lighter, which translates into less wear. They also have fewer and simpler parts, and fewer of those parts require fluids that need to be checked or replaced. Carbon-composite frames would yield further improvements.
On a more persnickety note: there is no Moore's Law for batteries. Moore's Law is just a prediction about the number of transistors that can be put on a chip over time. Some have expanded it to other computer-related fields, like disk storage, bandwidth, processing power. They've even tried to use it on the price of photovoltaics. The usage is still wrong, but at least there is an exponential trend they can point to. Battery progress is much more sedate, and I think it doesn't follow an exponential trend.
Anyhow, using Moore's Law as a synonym for exponential improvements in computer and semiconductor-related fields is one thing. Using it as a broad synonym for technological progress will get your geek card revoked. You don't want that.
Natural, unnatural. Who cares? We're just as dead. By your reasoning, all murders are natural deaths, the same as when bugs kill or eat each other. I have no problem with those semantics, as long as you don't go on to claim that we should therefore eliminate laws against murder. Which is basically what you're doing here.
In short, don't mistake semantic shenanigans for actual contributions to the discussion.
I don't know where you're getting your belief that "greenhouse gas emissions" is a loaded, anti-human term. There are unarguably natural sources of greenhouse gases. The oceans emit H20, trees emit methane, animals and volcanoes emit CO2. The difference is, those sources are historically well-balanced with CO2 sinks. Human emissions are not, which is why our (much smaller) emissions actually raise CO2 concentrations, when other sources don't. Source.
1) Since we started getting good satellite data on the subject (that is, since the 1970s) total solar output has varied by less than 1 part in 1000. Less than 1/10th of 1%. Source. Over that same period, the warming of the Earth has been accelerating. If it were caused by a recent increase in solar output (and the pre-1970s data would dispute this), we would have seen a slowdown since the 1970s.
2) Pretending that the sun is the only thing to be worried about is silly. As climate skeptics take great joy in pointing out, without the greenhouse gases in our atmosphere, our planet would be about 60C cooler than it is today. Comparatively, the last ice age was only 8C cooler. So the composition of the atmosphere matters a hell of a lot.
3) We have more to worry about if the sun goes nova? That's about as useful as telling a cancer patient that they should worry more about Earth-killing asteroids than about their own cancer. Yes, the absolute damage is far more severe, the risk of human extinction far more likely. But how many times in, oh, the last billion years has the Sun gone nova? Hint: the fact that you are here to consider the question argues strongly for *zero*.
4) In the first part of your post, you seem to be arguing that we are approaching another Maunder Minimum-like event. I don't see the evidence of this.
Depends entirely on what the "business" went into debt for. Ten trillion spent on to "bridges to nowhere" will probably not get repaid. Ten trillion spent on the health of our people, infrastructure investments that will pay dividends over decades, the education that increases our technological prowess, that money stands a good chance of getting repaid.
Our current debt is about a year's worth of GDP, and contains a mixture of wise and foolish spending. When somebody gets heavily into debt to buy an education, nobody looks twice at the choice.
Some argue that government necessarily spends money less efficiently than the private sector. I think current events are making that claim increasingly suspect.
I like Obama's approach. If it works, we should fund it. If it doesn't work, we should axe it, or reform it until it does. We are fortunate that the government does NOT have to run itself as a business. While it's important that they spend wisely and in the interests of us citizens, introducing short-term profit motive would be deadly to a lot of very beneficial government activity.
I think the best recourse for lobbyists would be a legal one.
I believe that you're required to register as a lobbyist if more than 20% of the work you're paid to do involves lobbying the Federal government. For online purposes, we might want to reduce that. But the main thing would be that working on participatory sites would be considered lobbying. If someone pays you to comment on the site, you would have to register as a lobbyist, and your online profile would be clearly distinguished as such.
I think this would mostly drive the paid lobbyists from the sites. I wonder whether that would be an entirely good thing, but I do think that the most influential lobbying activities are those that escape public notice, so lobbyists with narrow special interests might tend to avoid it. Groups that think they're working for the public good (churches, labor unions, pro-life/pro-choice groups, etc.) would probably stick around. It might help sort those who feel good about what they're proposing from those who know that less publicity is good for them.
Identifying traffic from outside the country is easy, when people don't care to hide the fact. But I could see an advocacy group paying offshore companies to launder their opinions to disguise their true origins. It would be illegal, of course. The question is, could the legal framework deal with it? Probably not.
Autospamming would be another problem entirely. "Slow down, cowboy" just wouldn't cut it. Software that looked for repetitious text between comments might help.
One idea I'm keen on is that of participatory working groups. If a large number of people want to discuss a topic, you divide them into small working groups. They come up with their ideas, then provide a summary and a representative to back it. That person goes on to the next level.
Maybe it's too formal a system, but I think similar things have been tried in face-to-face settings, with good results. I wish I could remember the name for the process, though.
I think the most important thing to a good online discussion is knowing who people are and where they're coming from. My suspicion is, the invention of a portable, relatively secure online reputation system would change everything.
I'm not hypothesizing a situation where a $30M company grows to become a $1B company. I'm hypothesizing a situation where uptake of Ubuntu costs Microsoft a billion dollars. That could happen without Canonical gaining a single paying client.
It's an astounding sort of asymmetrical warfare. So long as this little company continues raking in its $30M a year, it sits there like a pre-cancerous gene in Microsoft's butt. At any moment, it could blow up and start costing them licensing fees in the hundreds of millions or even billions.
I don't believe Linux is an existential threat to Microsoft over the short to medium term. But given that they're already facing layoffs, and economic downturns lead to all sorts of novel cost-cutting by consumers and businesses alike, Microsoft should definitely be concerned about the presence of a self-sustaining company geared towards the desktop Linux market.
If the vote is to determine the outcome of a section of legislation, then yes, you'd have to do careful filtering and weighting of the votes. Does the yea vote of someone who benefits from a "pork" project weigh more than the nay votes of the millions of people who would vote against it, merely because they object to any and all government spending? * Do paid lobbyists get to vote? Should they have less or more effect? How do you prevent multiple voting?
But as a way of simply taking the public's pulse on a piece of legislation, I think that a per-line or per-paragraph poll of legislation would be revealing. If nothing else, it would make it easier to find the controversial bits and comment on them.
* Which includes those who only like government spending money on better ways to blow people up.
>> With the topics divided by domain, it will keep the heat down by removing the urge to drag off-topic flames into a post. Merged, somebody might inject some nugget about gun control into their argument against solar cars and derail the whole thread.
Yeah. Or imagine if we were trying to have a discussion about health care costs or global warming, and some idiot kept trying to inject irrelevant thoughts about agricultural policy.
Or if we were trying to come up with ways to prevent crime, and somebody kept trying to derail the conversation with his thoughts on education and poverty.
Perhaps we'd like to have a serious conversation on how to help the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, and somebody used it to promote their thoughts on Iraq.
We'd never get anything done if we pretend that different issues could be connected.
I was about to apologize for my sarcasm, but then I re-read your comment, where you indicate that the best way to promote good transit policy is to keep it separate and distinct from energy policy. Double-yoo Tee Eff, man! Explain yourself!
Think about it another way: How much would Ubuntu's market share have to increase in order to cost Microsoft, say, a billion in revenue? Microsoft made about $60B last year. Let's guess that a third of that was from Windows. If Ubuntu came on strong and grabbed 5% of the Windows install base, that would probably be enough.
In fact, it might be smaller, since you'd also lose a lot of MS Office sales.
You want to go before the honchos of Microsoft and tell them that they can safely ignore a competitor who could so easily rise up and take a billion dollar chunk out of their hide?
The fact that this could be done by a $30M company -- a company approximately 1/2000th Microsoft's size -- should make Microsoft more worried, not less.
From where I'm sitting -- in front of an Ubuntu desktop -- the two are very comparable. They both facilitate the same tasks, they both run on the same hardware. The fact that one company has to put tens of thousands of developers on the payroll to do it, and the other almost certainly has fewer than 200 total employees is very telling.
Linux isn't going anywhere. Neither is Microsoft. But the economics of Linux are such that, at any moment, they could suddenly find their share of the OS market drop by ten or twenty percent. For a company that makes tens of billions in annual revenues from Windows, that has to be worrying.
You ought to throw a quick web interface onto that database, charge $10/year for a subscription, and rake in the mill^H^H^H^Hthous^H^H^H^H^Htens of dollars. I've done some preliminary market research, and IGOTCOWS.COM and COWCOUNTER.COM are both available.
I suspect that we need China more than China needs us. China has the ability to provide "stuff". We have the ability to provide paper, which becomes increasingly worthless as we give more of it away in exchange for "stuff". If our trading relationship collapsed, they're left with a sea of factories and a sea of people to work them. They could turn that infrastructure around and start making things for their own people.
What are we left with? At best, some claims on those Chinese factories by American investors. Those claims could be dismissed with a single word from the Chinese government: nationalization.
If we've learned anything from this recent financial crisis, it's that it's very easy to overestimate the value generated by shuffling paper from one place to another. That's why I'm in favor of retooling much of the auto industry so they're making wind turbines. China needs them, probably worse than we do, and certainly worse than they need our gas-guzzlers.
>> Why would we spend so much money in the 50's, 60's and 70's then essentially abandon space for short trips orbiting the planet, and relatively cheap robotic missions elsewhere.
Because once you've proven that you can make it to the moon, you've pretty much got the ability to drop a missile on any Earth-based target at will. Once you're to that point, there's not much more you can learn about space exploration technology that can be justified with near-term military applications.
That's why we stalled out the way we have. Space exploration was never a priority in its own right, and that people think otherwise is testimonial for government's ability to propagandize us.
Slashdot Mirror
No, we pay farmers not to plant crops because they've been fortunate enough to own pieces of land that cannot be farmed without extreme topsoil erosion or other environmental damage, and because it's more popular to bribe the farmers than to take the land outright.
I'm not aware of any other government program that pays farmers not to farm.
So, this tower is more than just silly and impractical; it's actually an existential threat to civilization. First we build this thing, then we start cannibalizing each other. Q.E.D.
If anything, it seems like this would make a civilization more rounded. With some of these in Manhattan, the laborers who grow our food could run home, shower, then go out to see a Broadway musical. You can't do that in Napa Valley. Though if the musical is "Cats," there's no reason you should want to.
Oooh! He knows what "comparative advantage" means!
The problem is, comparative advantage works really well for individuals within a diverse economy. It doesn't work well for entire regions or countries.
Imagine if aliens made contact, and offered us a wonderful deal: They'll make all our food. We, in turn, will manufacture "floovits." Who cares what floovits are. The point is, they want them, we can make them very easily, and we don't actually have any use for them.
We take the deal, shutter our own farms, and start manufacturing floovits like crazy. It's much easier work than farming, takes fewer people, and the food the aliens are giving us is tastier and more nutritious than what we've been growing ourselves.
Perfect example of comparative advantage, right?
Right.
Now comes the kicker. After a few decades, after we've basically forgotten how to feed ourselves, the aliens come to us and say, "we don't need floovits anymore. In fact, we don't need anything from you anymore. Bye."
Even if using Manhattan for office space is a much higher value activity at the moment, there is a perfectly good reason for setting aside some of that capacity for a "lower value" use. I'm sure you've heard of the PhD-level economic concept that underpins this thinking.
I think the reason for the comparison is:
1) both are scripting languages.
2) People just assume that PHP is scalable. It runs Wikipedia, and lots of other huge sites. If Ruby can be compared favorably to PHP, then it's hard to argue that it's "too slow" to base a usable framework off of.
3) Rails people tend to have a bit of a grudge against PHP people. Play nice, children!
> Besides, inefficient code will add up almost exponentially as your load increases.
Eh?
We're not talking about poor algorithm selection. We're talking about using a slower language rather than a faster language. Unless you deliberately adopt a "slower languages deserve slower algorithms" mentality, you're talking about a linear increase in hardware.
In that case, doubling the hardware requirements in exchange for even a 25% cut in coding time is going to be a huge boon for your company. If writing in a cleaner, more elegant language makes the code base smaller and easier to read, those senior developers are going to have a much easier time finding the bugs and the bottlenecks. Plus, if you can write the thing that much faster, your developers are going to have a lot more fun.
Since we're talking specifically about Rails here, the first optimization pass is usually A) finding pages and partials that can be cached, and B) tweaking your ActiveRecord queries so that the database grabs all the records it needs on the first pass. Both are simple to do, and once you've accomplished them it's going to be quite a while before a normal site is going to run into scaling issues.
>>I've been using the Beta for a while and it isn't a beta like say... an Ubuntu beta. This is a beta of a quality the open source world cannot obtain.
How are you liking your truncated MP3s?
was for AdBlock Plus. You can imagine the conspiracy theories that floated through my head when I saw it labeled as malware.
Actually, I think we'd have much more powerful $90 graphing calculators.
4) The government runs up some additional debt to get these things on the road.
To me, it makes sense for government to resort to deficit spending whenever there is a project with long-term payoffs, but the short term incentives keep the market from doing it. Still, I might prefer #3, especially if it was part of a tax reform that swapped the payroll tax for a carbon tax. Tax pollution, not work!
You're right about electric cars being cheaper to maintain, if battery degradation weren't an issue. The cars are lighter, which translates into less wear. They also have fewer and simpler parts, and fewer of those parts require fluids that need to be checked or replaced. Carbon-composite frames would yield further improvements.
On a more persnickety note: there is no Moore's Law for batteries. Moore's Law is just a prediction about the number of transistors that can be put on a chip over time. Some have expanded it to other computer-related fields, like disk storage, bandwidth, processing power. They've even tried to use it on the price of photovoltaics. The usage is still wrong, but at least there is an exponential trend they can point to. Battery progress is much more sedate, and I think it doesn't follow an exponential trend.
Anyhow, using Moore's Law as a synonym for exponential improvements in computer and semiconductor-related fields is one thing. Using it as a broad synonym for technological progress will get your geek card revoked. You don't want that.
With insulation, it would only take a small fraction of a battery's charge to keep itself warm.
Natural, unnatural. Who cares? We're just as dead. By your reasoning, all murders are natural deaths, the same as when bugs kill or eat each other. I have no problem with those semantics, as long as you don't go on to claim that we should therefore eliminate laws against murder. Which is basically what you're doing here.
In short, don't mistake semantic shenanigans for actual contributions to the discussion.
I don't know where you're getting your belief that "greenhouse gas emissions" is a loaded, anti-human term. There are unarguably natural sources of greenhouse gases. The oceans emit H20, trees emit methane, animals and volcanoes emit CO2. The difference is, those sources are historically well-balanced with CO2 sinks. Human emissions are not, which is why our (much smaller) emissions actually raise CO2 concentrations, when other sources don't. Source.
A few points:
1) Since we started getting good satellite data on the subject (that is, since the 1970s) total solar output has varied by less than 1 part in 1000. Less than 1/10th of 1%. Source. Over that same period, the warming of the Earth has been accelerating. If it were caused by a recent increase in solar output (and the pre-1970s data would dispute this), we would have seen a slowdown since the 1970s.
2) Pretending that the sun is the only thing to be worried about is silly. As climate skeptics take great joy in pointing out, without the greenhouse gases in our atmosphere, our planet would be about 60C cooler than it is today. Comparatively, the last ice age was only 8C cooler. So the composition of the atmosphere matters a hell of a lot.
3) We have more to worry about if the sun goes nova? That's about as useful as telling a cancer patient that they should worry more about Earth-killing asteroids than about their own cancer. Yes, the absolute damage is far more severe, the risk of human extinction far more likely. But how many times in, oh, the last billion years has the Sun gone nova? Hint: the fact that you are here to consider the question argues strongly for *zero*.
4) In the first part of your post, you seem to be arguing that we are approaching another Maunder Minimum-like event. I don't see the evidence of this.
We covered this during the election. "Earmarks" are not all wasteful, and account for a vanishingly small fraction of the overall federal budget.
But I agree, we should know who wrote (and who asked for) any specific part of any legislation, including spending bills.
Depends entirely on what the "business" went into debt for. Ten trillion spent on to "bridges to nowhere" will probably not get repaid. Ten trillion spent on the health of our people, infrastructure investments that will pay dividends over decades, the education that increases our technological prowess, that money stands a good chance of getting repaid.
Our current debt is about a year's worth of GDP, and contains a mixture of wise and foolish spending. When somebody gets heavily into debt to buy an education, nobody looks twice at the choice.
Some argue that government necessarily spends money less efficiently than the private sector. I think current events are making that claim increasingly suspect.
I like Obama's approach. If it works, we should fund it. If it doesn't work, we should axe it, or reform it until it does. We are fortunate that the government does NOT have to run itself as a business. While it's important that they spend wisely and in the interests of us citizens, introducing short-term profit motive would be deadly to a lot of very beneficial government activity.
I think the best recourse for lobbyists would be a legal one.
I believe that you're required to register as a lobbyist if more than 20% of the work you're paid to do involves lobbying the Federal government. For online purposes, we might want to reduce that. But the main thing would be that working on participatory sites would be considered lobbying. If someone pays you to comment on the site, you would have to register as a lobbyist, and your online profile would be clearly distinguished as such.
I think this would mostly drive the paid lobbyists from the sites. I wonder whether that would be an entirely good thing, but I do think that the most influential lobbying activities are those that escape public notice, so lobbyists with narrow special interests might tend to avoid it. Groups that think they're working for the public good (churches, labor unions, pro-life/pro-choice groups, etc.) would probably stick around. It might help sort those who feel good about what they're proposing from those who know that less publicity is good for them.
Identifying traffic from outside the country is easy, when people don't care to hide the fact. But I could see an advocacy group paying offshore companies to launder their opinions to disguise their true origins. It would be illegal, of course. The question is, could the legal framework deal with it? Probably not.
Autospamming would be another problem entirely. "Slow down, cowboy" just wouldn't cut it. Software that looked for repetitious text between comments might help.
One idea I'm keen on is that of participatory working groups. If a large number of people want to discuss a topic, you divide them into small working groups. They come up with their ideas, then provide a summary and a representative to back it. That person goes on to the next level.
Maybe it's too formal a system, but I think similar things have been tried in face-to-face settings, with good results. I wish I could remember the name for the process, though.
I think the most important thing to a good online discussion is knowing who people are and where they're coming from. My suspicion is, the invention of a portable, relatively secure online reputation system would change everything.
Ummm... you're not getting it.
I'm not hypothesizing a situation where a $30M company grows to become a $1B company. I'm hypothesizing a situation where uptake of Ubuntu costs Microsoft a billion dollars. That could happen without Canonical gaining a single paying client.
It's an astounding sort of asymmetrical warfare. So long as this little company continues raking in its $30M a year, it sits there like a pre-cancerous gene in Microsoft's butt. At any moment, it could blow up and start costing them licensing fees in the hundreds of millions or even billions.
I don't believe Linux is an existential threat to Microsoft over the short to medium term. But given that they're already facing layoffs, and economic downturns lead to all sorts of novel cost-cutting by consumers and businesses alike, Microsoft should definitely be concerned about the presence of a self-sustaining company geared towards the desktop Linux market.
If the vote is to determine the outcome of a section of legislation, then yes, you'd have to do careful filtering and weighting of the votes. Does the yea vote of someone who benefits from a "pork" project weigh more than the nay votes of the millions of people who would vote against it, merely because they object to any and all government spending? * Do paid lobbyists get to vote? Should they have less or more effect? How do you prevent multiple voting?
But as a way of simply taking the public's pulse on a piece of legislation, I think that a per-line or per-paragraph poll of legislation would be revealing. If nothing else, it would make it easier to find the controversial bits and comment on them.
* Which includes those who only like government spending money on better ways to blow people up.
>> With the topics divided by domain, it will keep the heat down by removing the urge to drag off-topic flames into a post. Merged, somebody might inject some nugget about gun control into their argument against solar cars and derail the whole thread.
Yeah. Or imagine if we were trying to have a discussion about health care costs or global warming, and some idiot kept trying to inject irrelevant thoughts about agricultural policy.
Or if we were trying to come up with ways to prevent crime, and somebody kept trying to derail the conversation with his thoughts on education and poverty.
Perhaps we'd like to have a serious conversation on how to help the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, and somebody used it to promote their thoughts on Iraq.
We'd never get anything done if we pretend that different issues could be connected.
I was about to apologize for my sarcasm, but then I re-read your comment, where you indicate that the best way to promote good transit policy is to keep it separate and distinct from energy policy. Double-yoo Tee Eff, man! Explain yourself!
As Amory Lovins says, optimizing each component of a system in isolation pessimizes the entire system.
Clearly, you don't know Orrin Hatch very well.
Think about it another way: How much would Ubuntu's market share have to increase in order to cost Microsoft, say, a billion in revenue? Microsoft made about $60B last year. Let's guess that a third of that was from Windows. If Ubuntu came on strong and grabbed 5% of the Windows install base, that would probably be enough.
In fact, it might be smaller, since you'd also lose a lot of MS Office sales.
You want to go before the honchos of Microsoft and tell them that they can safely ignore a competitor who could so easily rise up and take a billion dollar chunk out of their hide?
The fact that this could be done by a $30M company -- a company approximately 1/2000th Microsoft's size -- should make Microsoft more worried, not less.
From where I'm sitting -- in front of an Ubuntu desktop -- the two are very comparable. They both facilitate the same tasks, they both run on the same hardware. The fact that one company has to put tens of thousands of developers on the payroll to do it, and the other almost certainly has fewer than 200 total employees is very telling.
Linux isn't going anywhere. Neither is Microsoft. But the economics of Linux are such that, at any moment, they could suddenly find their share of the OS market drop by ten or twenty percent. For a company that makes tens of billions in annual revenues from Windows, that has to be worrying.
You ought to throw a quick web interface onto that database, charge $10/year for a subscription, and rake in the mill^H^H^H^Hthous^H^H^H^H^Htens of dollars. I've done some preliminary market research, and IGOTCOWS.COM and COWCOUNTER.COM are both available.
I suspect that we need China more than China needs us. China has the ability to provide "stuff". We have the ability to provide paper, which becomes increasingly worthless as we give more of it away in exchange for "stuff". If our trading relationship collapsed, they're left with a sea of factories and a sea of people to work them. They could turn that infrastructure around and start making things for their own people.
What are we left with? At best, some claims on those Chinese factories by American investors. Those claims could be dismissed with a single word from the Chinese government: nationalization.
If we've learned anything from this recent financial crisis, it's that it's very easy to overestimate the value generated by shuffling paper from one place to another. That's why I'm in favor of retooling much of the auto industry so they're making wind turbines. China needs them, probably worse than we do, and certainly worse than they need our gas-guzzlers.
>> Why would we spend so much money in the 50's, 60's and 70's then essentially abandon space for short trips orbiting the planet, and relatively cheap robotic missions elsewhere.
Because once you've proven that you can make it to the moon, you've pretty much got the ability to drop a missile on any Earth-based target at will. Once you're to that point, there's not much more you can learn about space exploration technology that can be justified with near-term military applications.
That's why we stalled out the way we have. Space exploration was never a priority in its own right, and that people think otherwise is testimonial for government's ability to propagandize us.